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An Overview of Chatbot Technology

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DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-49186-4_31

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 An Overview of Chatbot Technology

Eleni Adamopoulou(B) and Lefteris Moussiades

Department of Computer Science, International Hellenic University, Agios Loukas,

65404 Kavala, Greece
{eladamo,lmous}@cs.ihu.gr

Abstract. The use of chatbots evolved rapidly in numerous fields in recent years,
including Marketing, Supporting Systems, Education, Health Care, Cultural Her-
itage, and Entertainment. In this paper, we first present a historical overview of the
evolution of the international community’s interest in chatbots. Next, we discuss
the motivations that drive the use of chatbots, and we clarify chatbots’ usefulness
in a variety of areas. Moreover, we highlight the impact of social stereotypes on
chatbots design. After clarifying necessary technological concepts, we move on
to a chatbot classification based on various criteria, such as the area of knowledge
they refer to, the need they serve and others. Furthermore, we present the general
architecture of modern chatbots while also mentioning the main platforms for their
creation. Our engagement with the subject so far, reassures us of the prospects of
chatbots and encourages us to study them in greater extent and depth.

Keywords: Chatbot · Chatbot architecture · Artificial Intelligence · Machine

learning · NLU

1 Introduction
Artificial Intelligence (AI) increasingly integrates our daily lives with the creation and
analysis of intelligent software and hardware, called intelligent agents. Intelligent agents
can do a variety of tasks ranging from labor work to sophisticated operations. A chatbot
is a typical example of an AI system and one of the most elementary and widespread
examples of intelligent Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) [1]. It is a computer pro-
gram, which responds like a smart entity when conversed with through text or voice and
understands one or more human languages by Natural Language Processing (NLP) [2].
In the lexicon, a chatbot is defined as “A computer program designed to simulate con-
versation with human users, especially over the Internet” [3]. Chatbots are also known
as smart bots, interactive agents, digital assistants, or artificial conversation entities.
Chatbots can mimic human conversation and entertain users but they are not built only
for this. They are useful in applications such as education, information retrieval, business,
and e-commerce [4]. They became so popular because there are many advantages of
chatbots for users and developers too. Most implementations are platform-independent
and instantly available to users without needed installations. Contact to the chatbot is
spread through a user’s social graph without leaving the messaging app the chatbot lives
© IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2020
Published by Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
I. Maglogiannis et al. (Eds.): AIAI 2020, IFIP AICT 584, pp. 373–383, 2020.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49186-4_31
374 E. Adamopoulou and L. Moussiades

in, which provides and guarantees the user’s identity. Moreover, payment services are
integrated into the messaging system and can be used safely and reliably and a notification
system re-engages inactive users. Chatbots are integrated with group conversations or
shared just like any other contact, while multiple conversations can be carried forward
in parallel. Knowledge in the use of one chatbot is easily transferred to the usage of
other chatbots, and there are limited data requirements. Communication reliability, fast
and uncomplicated development iterations, lack of version fragmentation, and limited
design efforts for the interface are some of the advantages for developers too [5].
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In Sect. 2, we briefly present the
history of chatbots and highlight the growing interest of the research community. In
Sect. 3, some issues about the association with chatbots are discussed, while in Sect. 4,
essential concepts relevant to chatbot technology are described. Next, in Sect. 5, we
present a classification of existing chatbots while in Sect. 6, we present the underlying
chatbot architecture and the leading platforms for their development. Finally, Sect. 7
reports conclusions and highlights further research topics.

2 History
Alan Turing in 1950 proposed the Turing Test (“Can machines think?”), and it was at that
time that the idea of a chatbot was popularized [6]. The first known chatbot was Eliza,
developed in 1966, whose purpose was to act as a psychotherapist returning the user
utterances in a question form [7]. It used simple pattern matching [8] and a template-
based response mechanism. Its conversational ability was not good, but it was enough to
confuse people at a time when they were not used to interacting with computers and give
them the impetus to start developing other chatbots [5]. An improvement over ELIZA
was a chatbot with a personality named PARRY developed in 1972 [9]. In 1995, the
chatbot ALICE was developed which won the Loebner Prize, an annual Turing Test,
in years 2000, 2001, and 2004. It was the first computer to gain the rank of the “most
human computer” [10]. ALICE relies on a simple pattern-matching algorithm with the
underlying intelligence based on the Artificial Intelligence Markup Language (AIML)
[11], which makes it possible for developers to define the building blocks of the chatbot
knowledge [10]. Chatbots, like SmarterChild [12] in 2001, were developed and became
available through messenger applications. The next step was the creation of virtual
personal assistants like Apple Siri [13], Microsoft Cortana [14], Amazon Alexa [15],
Google Assistant [16] and IBM Watson [17].
As shown in Fig. 1 according to Scopus [18], there was a rapid growth of interest
in chatbots especially after the year 2016. Many chatbots were developed for industrial
solutions while there is a wide range of less famous chatbots relevant to research and
their applications [19].
 An Overview of Chatbot Technology 375

Fig. 1. Search results in Scopus by year for “chatbot” or “conversation agent” or “conversational
interface” as keywords from 2000 to 2019.

3 Associate with Chatbots

Why do users use chatbots? Chatbots seem to hold tremendous promise for providing
users with quick and convenient support responding specifically to their questions. The
most frequent motivation for chatbot users is considered to be productivity, while other
motives are entertainment, social factors, and contact with novelty. However, to balance
the motivations mentioned above, a chatbot should be built in a way that acts as a tool,
a toy, and a friend at the same time [8].
The reduction in customer service costs and the ability to handle many users at a
time are some of the reasons why chatbots have become so popular in business groups
[20]. Chatbots are no longer seen as mere assistants, and their way of interacting brings
them closer to users as friendly companions [21]. According to a study, social media
user requests on chatbots for customer service are emotional and informational, with
the first category rate being more than 40% and with users not intending to take specific
information [22]. Machine learning is what gives the capability to customer service
chatbots for sentiment detection and also the ability to relate to customers emotionally
as human operators do [23].
Concerning the user’s trust in chatbots, it depends on factors relative to the chatbot
itself, like how much it responds like a human, how it is self-presented, and how much
professional its appearance is. Nevertheless, it depends also on factors relative to its
service contexts, like the brand of the chatbot host, privacy and security in the chatbot,
and other risk issues about the topic of the request [10]. Human-likeness can be suggested
by using human figures (visual cues), human-associated names, or identity (identity
cues) and mimicking of human languages (conversational cues) [24]. It has already
been studied the influence of personification and interactivity in people’s disclosures
376 E. Adamopoulou and L. Moussiades

around sensitive topics, such as psychological stressors [25]. Important to mention is

that chatbots still lack empathy understanding meaning and that they are not as capable
as humans of understanding conversational undertones. Though progress has been made
in this field, and soon machines will not only be able to understand what somebody is
saying but also what is the feeling of what he is saying [26].
However, a biased view of gender is revealed, as most of the chatbots perform tasks
that echo historically feminine roles and articulate these features with stereotypical
behaviors. Accordingly, general or specialized chatbots automate work that is coded as
female, given that they mainly operate in service or assistance related contexts, acting
as personal assistants or secretaries [21].
Soon we will live in a world where conversational partners will be humans or chatbots,
and in many cases, we will not know and will not care what our conversational partner
will be [27].

4 Essential Concepts
Below are some fundamental concepts related to chatbot technology.
Pattern Matching is predicated on representative stimulus-response blocks. A sen-
tence (stimuli) is entered, and output (response) is created consistent with the user input
[11]. Eliza and ALICE were the first chatbots developed using pattern recognition algo-
rithms. The disadvantage of this approach is that the responses are entirely predictable,
repetitive, and lack the human touch. Also, there is no storage of past responses, which
can lead to looping conversations [28].
The Artificial Intelligence Markup Language (AIML) was created from 1995
to 2000, and it is based on the concepts of Pattern Recognition or Pattern Matching
technique. It is applied to natural language modeling for the dialogue between humans
and chatbots that follow the stimulus-response approach. It is an XML-based markup
language and it is tag-based. As shown in Fig. 2, AIML is based on basic units of
dialogue called categories (tag <category>) which are formed by user input patterns
(tag <pattern>) and chatbot responses (tag <template>) [11].

<aiml version="1.0.1" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<category>
<pattern> My name is * and I am * years old </pattern>
<template> Hello <star/>. I am also <star index="2"/> years old!</template>
</category>
</aiml>

Fig. 2. Example of AIML code

Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) may be used together with AIML for the develop-
ment of chatbots. It is used to discover likenesses between words as vector representation
[29]. Template-based questions like greetings and general questions can be answered
using AIML while other unanswered questions use LSA to give replies [30].
Chatscript, being the successor of the AIML language, is an expert system, which
consists of an open-source scripting language and the engine that runs it. It is comprised
 An Overview of Chatbot Technology 377

of rules which are associated with topics, finding the best item that matches the user query
string and executing a rule in that topic. Chatscript also includes long-term memory in
the form of \$ variables which can be used to store specific user information like the
name or age of the user. It is also case-sensitive, widening the possible responses that can
be given to the same user input based on the intended emotion, as uppercase is typically
used in conversations to indicate emphasis [28].
RiveScript is a plain text, line-based scripting language for the development of
chatbots and other conversational entities. It is open-source with available interfaces for
Go, Java, JavaScript, Perl, and Python [31].
Natural Language Processing (NLP), an area of artificial intelligence, explores
the manipulation of natural language text or speech by computers. Knowledge of the
understanding and use of human language is gathered to develop techniques that will
make computers understand and manipulate natural expressions to perform desired tasks
[32]. Most NLP techniques are based on machine learning.
Natural Language Understanding (NLU) is at the core of any NLP task. It is a
technique to implement natural user interfaces such as a chatbot. NLU aims to extract
context and meanings from natural language user inputs, which may be unstructured
and respond appropriately according to user intention [32]. It identifies user intent
and extracts domain-specific entities. More specifically, an intent represents a map-
ping between what a user says and what action should be taken by the chatbot. Actions
correspond to the steps the chatbot will take when specific intents are triggered by user
inputs and may have parameters for specifying detailed information about it [28]. Intent
detection is typically formulated as sentence classification in which single or multiple
intent labels are predicted for each sentence [32].
An entity is a tool for extracting parameter values from natural language inputs.
For example, consider the sentence “What is the weather in Greece?”. The user intent
is to learn the weather forecast. The entity value is Greece. Therefore, the user asks for
the weather forecast in Greece [33]. Entities can be either system-defined or developer-
defined. For example, the system entity @sys.date corresponds to standard date refer-
ences like 10 August 2019 or the 10th of August [28]. Domain entity extraction usually
referred to as a slot-filling problem, is formulated as a sequential tagging problem where
parts of a sentence are extracted and tagged with domain entities [32].
Finally, contexts are strings that store the context of the object the user is referring
to or talking about. For example, a user might refer to a previously defined object in his
following sentence. A user may input “Switch on the fan.” Here the context to be saved
is the fan so that when a user says, “Switch it off” as the next input, the intent “switch
off” may be invoked on the context “fan” [28].

5 Types of Chatbots
Chatbots can be classified using different parameters: the knowledge domain, the service
provided, the goals, the input processing and response generation method, the human-aid,
and the build method.
Classification based on the knowledge domain considers the knowledge a chatbot
can access or the amount of data it is trained upon. Open domain chatbots can talk about
378 E. Adamopoulou and L. Moussiades

general topics and respond appropriately, while closed domain chatbots are focused on
a particular knowledge domain and might fail to respond to other questions [34].
Classification based on the service provided considers the sentimental proximity
of the chatbot to the user, the amount of intimate interaction that takes place, and it is
also dependent upon the task the chatbot is performing. Interpersonal chatbots lie in
the domain of communication and provide services such as Restaurant booking, Flight
booking, and FAQ bots. They are not companions of the user, but they get information and
pass them on to the user. They can have a personality, can be friendly, and will probably
remember information about the user, but they are not obliged or expected to do so.
Intrapersonal chatbots exist within the personal domain of the user, such as chat apps
like Messenger, Slack, and WhatsApp. They are companions to the user and understand
the user like a human does. Inter-agent chatbots become omnipresent while all chatbots
will require some inter-chatbot communication possibilities. The need for protocols
for inter-chatbot communication has already emerged. Alexa-Cortana integration is an
example of inter-agent communication [34].
Classification based on the goals considers the primary goal chatbots aim to
achieve. Informative chatbots are designed to provide the user with information that
is stored beforehand or is available from a fixed source, like FAQ chatbots. Chat-
based/Conversational chatbots talk to the user, like another human being, and their goal
is to respond correctly to the sentence they have been given. Task-based chatbots perform
a specific task such as booking a flight or helping somebody. These chatbots are intelligent
in the context of asking for information and understanding the user’s input. Restaurant
booking bots and FAQ chatbots are examples of Task-based chatbots [34, 35].
Classification based on the input processing and response generation method
takes into account the method of processing inputs and generating responses. There are
three models used to produce the appropriate responses: rule-based model, retrieval-
based model, and generative model [36].
Rule-based model chatbots are the type of architecture which most of the first
chatbots have been built with, like numerous online chatbots. They choose the system
response based on a fixed predefined set of rules, based on recognizing the lexical form of
the input text without creating any new text answers. The knowledge used in the chatbot
is humanly hand-coded and is organized and presented with conversational patterns [28].
A more comprehensive rule database allows the chatbot to reply to more types of user
input. However, this type of model is not robust to spelling and grammatical mistakes in
user input. Most existing research on rule-based chatbots studies response selection for
single-turn conversation, which only considers the last input message. In more human-
like chatbots, multi-turn response selection takes into consideration previous parts of the
conversation to select a response relevant to the whole conversation context [37].
A little different from the rule-based model is the retrieval-based model, which
offers more flexibility as it queries and analyzes available resources using APIs [36].
A retrieval-based chatbot retrieves some response candidates from an index before it
applies the matching approach to the response selection [37].
The generative model generates answers in a better way than the other three models,
based on current and previous user messages. These chatbots are more human-like
 An Overview of Chatbot Technology 379

and use machine learning algorithms and deep learning techniques. However, there are
difficulties in building and training them [36].
Another classification for chatbots considers the amount of human-aid in their com-
ponents. Human-aided chatbots utilize human computation in at least one element from
the chatbot. Crowd workers, freelancers, or full-time employees can embody their intel-
ligence in the chatbot logic to fill the gaps caused by limitations of fully automated chat-
bots. While human computation, compared to rule-based algorithms and machine learn-
ing, provides more flexibility and robustness, still, it cannot process a given piece of
information as fast as a machine, which makes it hard to scale to more user requests [35].
Chatbots can also be classified according to the permissions provided by their devel-
opment platform. Development platforms can be of open-source, such as RASA, or can
be of proprietary code such as development platforms typically offered by large compa-
nies such as Google or IBM. Open-source platforms provide the chatbot designer with
the ability to intervene in most aspects of implementation. Closed platforms, typically
act as black boxes, which may be a significant disadvantage depending on the project
requirements. However, access to state-of-the-art technologies may be considered more
immediate for large companies. Moreover, one may assume that chatbots developed
based on large companies’ platforms may be benefited by a large amount of data that
these companies collect.
Of course, chatbots do not exclusively belong to one category or another, but these
categories exist in each chatbot in varying proportions.

6 Design and Development

The design and development of a chatbot involve a variety of techniques [29]. Under-
standing what the chatbot will offer and what category falls into helps developers pick
the algorithms or platforms and tools to build it. At the same time, it also helps the
end-users understand what to expect [34].
The requirements for designing a chatbot include accurate knowledge representation,
an answer generation strategy, and a set of predefined neutral answers to reply when user
utterance is not understood [38]. The first step in designing any system is to divide it
into constituent parts according to a standard so that a modular development approach
can be followed [28]. In Fig. 3, a general chatbot architecture is introduced.
The process starts with a user’s request, for example, “What is the meaning of
environment?”, to the chatbot using a messenger app like Facebook, Slack, WhatsApp,
WeChat or Skype, or an app using text or speech input like Amazon Echo [39].
After the chatbot receives the user request, the Language Understanding Component
parses it to infer the user’s intention and the associated information (intent: “translate,”
entities: [word: “environment”]) [35].
Once a chatbot reaches the best interpretation it can, it must determine how to
proceed [40]. It can act upon the new information directly, remember whatever it has
understood and wait to see what happens next, require more context information or ask
for clarification.
When the request is understood, action execution and information retrieval take
place. The chatbot performs the requested actions or retrieves the data of interest from
380 E. Adamopoulou and L. Moussiades

Fig. 3. General chatbot architecture

its data sources, which may be a database, known as the Knowledge Base of the chatbot,
or external resources that are accessed through an API call [35].
Upon retrieval, the Response Generation Component uses Natural Language Gener-
ation (NLG) [41] to prepare a natural language human-like response to the user based on
the intent and context information returned from the user message analysis component.
The appropriate responses are produced by one of the three models mentioned in Sect. 5
of the paper: rule-based, retrieval based, and generative model [36].
A Dialogue Management Component keeps and updates the context of a conversation
which is the current intent, identified entities, or missing entities required to fulfill user
requests. Moreover, it requests missing information, processes clarifications by users,
and asks follow-up questions. For example, the chatbot may respond: “Would you like
to tell me as well an example sentence with the word environment?” [35].
Many commercial and open-source options are available for the development of a
chatbot. The number of chatbot-related technologies is already overwhelming and grow-
ing each day [42]. Chatbots are developed in two ways: using any programming language
like Java, Clojure, Python, C++, PHP, Ruby, and Lisp or using state-of-the-art platforms.
At this time, we are distinguishing six leading NLU cloud platforms that developers can
use to create applications able to understand natural languages: Google’s DialogFlow
[43], Facebook’s wit.ai [44], Microsoft LUIS [45], IBM Watson Conversation [17],
Amazon Lex [46], and SAP Conversation AI [47]. All these platforms are supported by
machine learning. They share some standard functionality (they are cloud-based, they
support various programming and natural languages) but differ significantly in other
aspects [33]. Other known chatbot development platforms are RASA [48], Botsify [49],
Chatfuel [50], Manychat [51], Flow XO [52], Chatterbot [53], Pandorabots [54], Botkit
[55], and Botlytics [56].

7 Conclusions

Minimal human interference in the use of devices is the goal of our world of technology.
Chatbots can reach out to a broad audience on messaging apps and be more effective than
humans are. At the same time, they may develop into a capable information-gathering
 An Overview of Chatbot Technology 381

tool. They provide significant savings in the operation of customer service departments.
With further development of AI and machine learning, somebody may not be capable
of understanding whether he talks to a chatbot or a real-life agent.
We consider that this research provides useful information about the basic principles
of chatbots. Users and developers can have a more precise understanding of chatbots and
get the ability to use and create them appropriately for the purpose they aim to operate.
Further work of this research would be exploring in detail existing chatbot platforms
and compare them. It would also be interesting to examine the degree of ingenuity and
functionality of current chatbots. Some ethical issues relative to chatbots would be worth
studying like abuse and deception, as people, on some occasions, believe they talk to
real humans while they are talking to chatbots.

Acknowledgments. This work is partially supported by the MPhil program “Advanced Technolo-
gies in Informatics and Computers”, hosted by the Department of Computer Science, International
Hellenic University.

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